New book tells tale of local architecture

New book tells tale of local architecture

Architect in Indonesia (1910-1926)
Ir.J.L. Ghijssels
Seram Press, 1996.
127 pages

JAKARTA (JP): This book was initiated by the architect's
grandson Ir R.W. Heringa in honor of his Opa Snor (his
mustachioed grandfather), Ir. Frans Johan Louwrens Ghijsels.

Ir. R.W. Heringa inherited the archives of his beloved
grandfather when his grandmother died in the Netherlands in
1977. The archive consisted of architectural books, drawings,
letters and photographs of his works. After having visited the
sites and having seen the numerous buildings, he decided to
compile a book, which was achieved with the help of many
collaborators.

F.J. L. Ghijsels was born in 1882 in Tulung Agung, East
Java. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic in Delft,
where he obtained his engineering diploma in 1909. Among his
contemporaries were Henri Maclaine Pont, H. Menalda van
Schouwenburg en Thomas Karsten, all well-known architects in
Indonesia.

Perhaps it was because he spent his youth in Indonesia that he
decided to apply for a job at the Municipal Works Department in
Batavia (Old Jakarta). In the summer of 1910 the appointment came
and Ghijsels and his newly wed bride departed for the East
Indies, where they arrived in October of the same year. In 1912
Ghijsels left the department and found employment in the
architectural division of the Department of Public Works in
Batavia.

Designs in this period were for the telephone office in
Surabaya, the post office in Semarang (Central Java) and the KPM
hospital in Jati Petamburan, Batavia (now Rumah Sakit Pelni).
These buildings are still in their original state today.

In 1916 Ghijsels set up his own bureau called the Algemeen
Ingenieurs Architecten Bureau (AIA). Its relationship with the
royal shipping company Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschapij (KPM)
was continued, and one of the first projects commissioned to the
bureau was the head office building on Merdeka Timur, now housing
the Department of Sea Transportation.

They went on to build several office buildings, hospitals,
churches, theosophical lodges, recreation centers, etc. in
Batavia as well as Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Semarang and even
Kalimantan.

Many of these buildings have survived. Among the most well-
known are probably the offices on Kali Besar, now housing the PT
Samudra and Toshiba offices, the Kota railway station in Jakarta,
the Internatio building in Surabaya and the hospital Panti Rapih
in Yogyakarta.

Thanks to the habit of extensive letter writing (sometimes
Ghijsels would write two letters a day to his wife when she was
staying in the cooler mountain areas to escape the heat in
Batavia) we are able to follow Ghijsels's aspirations, worries
and his joy when a design has been accepted or when a building is
finished. However, this book is not just an emotional journey to
Heringa's grandfather's past; it has become an architectural
history book of the first three decades of this century.

After his departure to the Netherlands in 1929, where he
would settle with his family, the bureau continued to work and
produced such monumental works as the Villa Isola in Bandung (now
the IKIP teachers training college) and the Paulus church on
Taman Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta.

As Ian Buruma wrote in his review of the Rem Koolhaas book
S.M..L.XL: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large in the New York
Review of Books vol. XLIII, nr 19:

"Holland is not a country that inspires people to think big.
Dutch architecture, old and new, is notable for its lack of
Babylonian pretensions... The Dutch left no monumental buildings
in their colonies."

This statement may be true, but Ghijsels and the AIA
certainly contributed some interesting sites and left some
elegant buildings all around Indonesia.

-- Myra Sidharta